Tag: polyptych

George Bisacca, Senior Conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, considers the stylistic transition from the frame of the Gothic polyptych to that of the Renaissance altarpiece. This paper was given as a presentation at the Frame Study Day, National Gallery, London, on 15th May 2015.

This is an altarpiece at the Metropolitan by Taddeo Gaddi of around 1340, but it has been radically altered sometime in the last quarter of the 15th Century.

Taddeo Gaddi, details of altarpiece.

There are two incompatible aesthetics at work here. The rigidity of the standing Gothic figures has little to do with the relaxed poses of the Renaissance figures of the Evangelists, who hook their elbows over the fictive lilac framing elements; or the decorative pilasters, too worldly for the austerity of the standing Saints.

The Gaddi altarpiece, of course, would originally have looked very different. We can get some idea if we examine some of the relatively unaltered examples of his work.

We might superimpose on this Gothic altarpiece the figures from the Metropolitan Gaddi; although the effect is still not as it would have looked when completed, because the flat tops of the panels would also have had painted pinnacle panels with finials.

We can see another representation of a complete mediaeval altarpiece, including the side buttresses, in this wonderfully accurate fresco of a polyptych by Lippo Vanni in San Francesco in Siena. They’re not exactly analogous, but this gives an idea of the verticality of the Gothic altarpiece, with gabled tops and finials, which dominated the entire Trecento in Italy.

The alteration of the Metropolitan’s Gaddi in the late 15th century would first have entailed the removal of the gables and finials.

The colonets and raised framing elements were then prised off…

… the arched tops of the panels were cut…

…triangular wooden spandrels were inserted to create a rectangle…

… and then these spandrel areas were painted, and Renaissance pilasters added, to replace the original carved colonets.

Finally an imposing entablature frame was added, with fluted and reeded pilasters.

Now, why would the Metropolitan dedicate so much precious wall space to something that has been so compromised, so radically altered?

I would like to propose that, rather than focus on its compromised aesthetic, it can be seen as an exceptional example, unique in the United States, of the profound shift that occurred in Florence in the second and third decades of the fifteenth century. That shift can be considered perhaps one of the most, if not the most, fundamental and rapid changes in the history – not only of framing – but of architecture as well. It began in Florence and quickly spread throughout Italy and then the rest of Europe – and the reverberations are still being felt to this day.

Brunelleschi began construction on the Ospedale degli Innocenti in 1419, and it is considered the first building of the Renaissance to transpose a classical vocabulary onto a public and ecclesiastical building.

Vasari tells us that Brunelleschi was so taken by a description recounted to him by Donatello of his recent trip to Rome and the ancient ruins he had seen there, and in particular the carved figures on a Roman sarcophagus, that he is said to have set out almost immediately and walked to Rome to see for himself. He remained there for three months studying the ruins. He did not slavishly copy the classical forms but assimilated the vocabulary and imbued it with a greater metaphysical sense of pure geometric proportion.

In the case of the Innocenti, the height of the columns is equal to the spread of the arch, making a perfect square, and again equal to the distance to the back wall of the arcade, forming a perfect cube. Each bay is surmounted by a hemisphere dome, then, half the height of the square.

At the same time that the Innocenti and the Cupola were beginning to rise, ground was broken on the Medici’s parish church, San Lorenzo, for which Brunelleschi is known to have ordered rectangular altarpieces in 1425.

With the near simultaneous construction going on at the Cathedral, at San Lorenzo, at the Innocenti, across the river at Santo Spirito, and finally at the Pazzi Chapel adjacent to Santa Croce, the entire fabric of the city was being transformed. During these years, with the rise of Humanism, Ghiberti, Michelozzo, and the next generation of architects, including Leon Battista Alberti, Guliano da Maiano, and the Sangallos, further developed and refined the classicizing style, leading to new constructions, the renovation of family chapels, and the commissioning of new or updated artworks. The Ricordanze, the workshop logbooks of Neri di Bicci, compiled between 1453 and 1475, cite several examples of existing paintings being brought in to be adapted to the new style – called ‘all’antica’ – specifying pilasters with capitals and friezes. So prevalent did the rectangular format become that we find in the Ricordanze the first references to the painting as ‘il quadro’ – the square (or rectangle) – regardless of its shape. In fact, there are even references to a ‘quadro tondo,’ a round painting, but, literally a ‘round square.’ In modern spoken Italian, the most common word for a painting is still today simply ‘un quadro.’

As the surrounding architecture modernized to the new Renaissance classicism, many altarpieces were logically updated as well. Gothic altarpieces might be retained and modified because they held a particular significance or value, as with the reframing of Giotto’s Coronation polyptych in the Baroncelli chapel at Santa Croce.

Other examples may have retained the earlier paintings simply as a cost-saving measure, like the example (above) from San Martino a Mensola, north of Fiesole. The unknown Master painted the panel in 1381 and it was modernized in the third quarter of the 15th century. All three altarpieces in the church received a similar treatment.

In fact, one of the others also happens to be by Taddeo Gaddi, like the Metropolitan’s panel.

During this transitional phase, many artists and panel-makers with a less sophisticated understanding of correct classical detail and proportion produced very curious conflations of Gothic and classical elements.

In the Pala di Ripalta, above, by Andrea di Giusto, currently in the storerooms of the Uffizi, the pointed arches have been rounded and additions have been made above the gables, to adapt it to the new all but obligatory rectangular format, but basically it’s a Gothic altarpiece.

This is another example, also by Andrea di Giusto, painted in the following year (1437), now in the Accademia in Florence. The colonets have been eliminated and the design is more open, but the triptych organization still persists – albeit with some rather squashed interrupted ogees. The curious overhang (also present in the previous example), which functions almost like a baldachin, is present in other transitional works.

This Coronation of 1430 by Bicci di Lorenzo at Santa Trinità also doesn’t completely escape the Gothic idiom by incorporating a gabled entablature. The construction here is still very Gothic in that the panel extends nearly to the edges, and all framing elements are attached flat against the face of the panel, as you can infer from the oblique image of the reverse at the bottom left, above.

It should be noted that even pre-eminent architects struggled with this transition, as we can see here with Michelozzo’s façade for the church of Sant’Agostino in Montepulciano of the 1430s. The first storey, with classical pilasters and entablature, sits uneasily beneath the Gothic crest of the tympanum, and the row of blind pointed arches.

A much purer use of a classical vocabulary is illustrated by a small group of five altarpieces of similar size and proportion but individualized detailing, displayed in the west transept of Santo Spirito in Florence, which very probably reflect Brunelleschi’s own original designs – although they were only built between the 1460s and 1480s. Most of the paliotto panels below the altars are 15th century as well.

These designs clearly show the more accurate architectural or structural underpinnings of Renaissance classism, when compared with the more superficial or decorative elements in previous examples.

The proportions of these frames were similar to those of the frame on the Taddeo Gaddi in the Metropolitan with which this piece began, and so we used the base of the Botticini frame (above) in Santo Spirito as a source to complete the predella of the Gaddi, which was missing.

It is interesting to note that most of these 15th century frames do not have pedestal bases which break forward beneath the pilasters, as in later examples; in this one from 1483, for instance, which is for the Pollaiuolo altarpiece in San Gimignano.

These types of frames are properly called ‘entablature frames’ but are often referred to as ‘tabernacle frames’; although to my mind, these usually refer to smaller domestic examples, such as the one above, which often incorporate an apron beneath the frame. The use of the word tabernacle probably derives from the wall-mounted marble surrounds of actual tabernacles, that is, the place where the consecrated Host was stored in the Catholic liturgy.

This famous example of a tabernacle by Desiderio da Settignano in San Lorenzo illustrates the structure – although the arrangement of elements as it stands here is not necessarily correct. The tabernacle had originally been incorporated into a rood screen, or ‘tramezzo’ in Italian. It was dismantled when the tramezzo was removed from the nave, and no record has yet come to light to confirm the original configuration. Several scholars have questioned the present arrangement. What concerns us here is the central section with the door, now missing, at its centre, which formed the actual container for the Host.

By the 1480s, the predominance of the new classical style was taken for granted. This example designed by Guliano da Sangallo in 1485 is in the Sassetti Chapel of Santa Trinità in Florence.

Domenico Ghirlandaio, Adoration of the Shepherds

In the painting it contains, by Domenico Ghirlandaio, even the traditionally rustic stable where Christ was born is now depicted with fluted classical pilasters, and the trough from which the animals feed is a Roman sarcophagus. The procession in the background even winds through a Roman triumphal arch much like the Arch of Titus.

Notice the deep carving of the decorative motifs on the pilasters and frieze of the Lippi, as contrasted with this elegantly restrained contemporary version on Botticelli’s Annunciation of 1489 at the Uffizi, commissioned for Santa Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi.

It should be mentioned that the simplification to an uninterrupted rectangular format was not merely a function of the changing architectural taste; it also served a growing need to bring narrative painting from the predella up into the primary pictorial plane. Technically, it served another innovative function: the fabrication of the frame and the panel as two separate and independent objects. This allowed them to be made simultaneously, shortening the fabrication time and making the construction more efficient. For the first time, the panel could be inserted into a routed track behind the inner sight edge. The ‘rabbet,’ as it has come to be called, could then mask the space necessary for the eventual expansion and contraction of the panel. This is nothing less than the birth of the modern picture frame.

The purpose of this extended introduction has been to explain why this curious and ultimately unsuccessful re-framing of Gaddi’s Madonna enthroned… encapsulates a larger story about the transition from Gothic to Renaissance and the evolution of architectural frames. This evolution was centred in Tuscany; it took a little longer to reach the outlying regions of Italy – such as Venice.

The treatment of the San Vincente Ferrer frame is decorative and superficial, but by 1488, in the sacristy of the Frari, Bellini has integrated his triptych frame with plausible fictive architectural spaces within the painting, something he continues to refine in successive years.

Here, finally, is Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece of 1505, where the stone framing elements and frieze continue into the painting: the apotheosis of the Renaissance classical frame.

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George Bisacca has been Conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1983. He is also co-chairman of the Getty Panel Paintings Initiative, and – with Timothy Newbery and Laurence Kanter – the author of Italian Renaissance Frames (1990), the invaluable book/exhibition catalogue based on the Met’s own collection. Although out of print, this can now be downloaded from the Museum’s website.